Oct. 19, 1941: Electric Turbines Get First Wind

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Oct. 19, 1941: Electric Turbines Get First Wind

1941: The Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine feeds AC power to the electric grid, the first wind machine ever to do so.

The unprecedented project was built up from nothing, practically conjured, by Palmer Putnam, an MIT-trained geologist with no formal education or experience in wind power. He was a fascinating character, a clean-energy entrepreneur 70 years ahead of his time.

Vannevar Bush, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's science adviser, showered praise on this engineer-of-all-trades, calling Putnam a "go-getter" in his autobiography and noting that he "had some of the characteristics of the best type of promoter in industry. He was well-liked by men with lots of drive, and often disliked by those with less." His friends called him Put, after the Greatest Generation–traditions of the day.

Before this project, windmills had just pumped water for farmers in the boonies, or charged the batteries of rural radios so they could pick up the AM stations that brought news across the lonely, whistling prairies. The people who sold windmills marketed them to ranchers and farmers; their advertisements appeared in magazines like American Thresherman, Farm Power, Agricultural Technology and Successful Farming.

The American windmill, as it was called, was simple and Western and rugged. Its shape hardly changed after key 1880s experiments by Thomas Perry resulted in the founding of the Aermotor company, which dominated the industry thereafter.

But that's not the kind of turbine that Putnam had in mind. After looking into the designs of the past, he immediately decided that the economics of scale dictated that he build a wind turbine with 75-foot blades, the largest in the world. It would generate more than a megawatt of power and feed it on to the grid, working in tandem with a hydroelectric plant to even out the intermittency of the wind and the seasonality of water generation.

No one had ever pulled off that balancing act before, and most people working in the wind industry were probably too sane to try.

It's important to understand how ridiculously grand the project really was. Its scale — 10 times as powerful as the very largest turbine and a thousand times more powerful than most of them — was almost unimaginable.

To plan an equally ambitious project today would mean setting out to build a machine that pumps out 65 megawatts. This was a small group of inventors' attempt to make a leap into a different future with breakthrough technology.

The construction of such a novel machine was lousy with difficulties, some internal and many external. The exigencies of a country preparing for war caused delays and trouble. The inventors' desire to finish and monetize the turbine before the war reached the United States may have accelerated the pace of R&D beyond what prudence would have dictated.

The strange thing is: Putnam succeeded.

"Vermont's mountain winds were harnessed last week to generate electricity for its homes and factories," read the Sept. 8, 1941, issue of Time, jumping the gun a bit. "Slowly, like the movements of an awakening giant, two stainless-steel vanes — the size and shape of a bomber's wings — began to rotate."

The turbine ran through hundreds of hours of testing up to 1943, often pumping power onto the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation's electrical grid. The project's engineers were sure that, technically, the machine worked.

The Smith-Putnam wind turbine stood as a testament to the power of human — and American — ingenuity. A decade before, Soviet engineers had built the world's largest wind turbine, a 100-kilowatt machine. Now the Yanks had constructed their own, 10 times more powerful.

Time concluded its article on the project with a hopeful half-prediction, "New England ranges may someday rival Holland as a land of windmills." This was, after all, merely the prototype for whole lines of turbines that would be more resistant to German bombs than a centralized coal plant.

Unluckily, a bearing broke in 1943, and the war prevented its replacement until 1945. With the war waning, the wind machine got back up and running in the spring of that year. And that's when disaster struck.

At midnight on March 26, 1945, the wind was blowing at a sleepy 5 miles an hour, too slow to make electricity. Harold Perry, a construction foreman, had been working nonstop for the 23 grueling days since the renewable power plant had gone back online after repairs. That night, an elevator carried Perry 100 feet up through the oil-derrick–like tower to the small, armored building that housed the controls for the world's largest wind machine.

Atop the rural Vermont mountaintop known as Grandpa's Knob, Perry didn't know that the grandest wind experiment in the first few millennia of human existence was about to fail.

Perry's job was to watch over the turbine and make sure that everything ran smoothly. The turbine had built-in methods for "coning" out of the wind to keep it from spinning too quickly, but it seemed like a good idea to have someone around … just in case.

During the day, Perry could stand behind the rotating blades in a flannel shirt and a hardhat, staring out at the unspoiled expanses of rural New England. Old films show the blades — the bomber wing look-alikes — beating a rhythmic, majestic whomp-whomp right in front of his face.

At night, however, he couldn't see much out there. The wind was picking up.

At exactly 3:10 a.m. on March 26, 1945, after more than 1,100 hours of operation, the Smith-Putnam turbine experienced an epic failure. One of the turbine's blades broke clean off and went sailing 750 feet through the night. The force of the breaking blade threw Perry off his feet, as the unbalanced machine shook like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise when it's under attack.

Putnam dramatized the scene in his book on the project, Power from the Wind:

Suddenly he found himself on his face on the floor, jammed against one wall of the control room. He got to his knees and was straightening up to start for the control panel, when he was again thrown to the floor.

He collected himself, got off the floor, hurled his solid 225 pounds over the rotating 24-inch main shaft, reached the controls, and brought the unit to a full stop in about 10 seconds by rapidly feathering what was found to be the remaining blade of the turbine.

A photo taken the next day shows the enormous blade on the ground, men walking and crawling near it like the Lilliputians around Gulliver. The book's caption reads simply, "The Blade That Failed."

It's easy to see catastrophic failure in the Smith-Putnam turbine. What went wrong is as obvious as a 75-foot blade lying on the ground. The existence and failure of the turbine hurt renewable-energy advocates in political debates, too.

At congressional hearings in 1951 to provide increased wind-power funding, one historian notes, "[L]egislators considered Putnam's blade failure to have proved the whole endeavor a washout."

The machine's failure played right into the hands of those committed to other forms of electrical production: fossil, atomic or solar.

Putnam himself later advocated the use of atomic and solar power to replace fossil fuels in the long run. He devoted only a few dismissive sentences to the potential of wind power in a sweeping energy analysis he wrote for the Atomic Energy Commission in the early 1950s.

But the turbine wasn't a failure for the thousands of wind engineers who've come after Putnam. "Interest in developing large wind-electric generating systems in the United States was stimulated primarily by one man, Palmer C. Putnam," a crisis-induced 1973 NASA research report on alternative energy found.

Putnam might have failed, but he failed well.

He created data on which inventors could build the future. In a startlingly progressive move, the S. Morgan Smith Company, which had bankrolled the project, assigned their patents to the public domain and asked Putnam to write a book detailing what happened, so that others could continue the work.

They made the wind data they'd gathered from the region public. This turns out to have been immensely helpful to later generations.

Without the unique experiment, nothing would have been known about large-scale systems. Less data means more risk — and risk is expensive in big power-plant projects. By gathering data on what did and didn't work, Putnam saved time and money for subsequent researchers.

The economic crisis is now causing a shakeout in green industry, separating the winners from the losers. In some cases, it's because the technologies aren't working or aren't scaling up.

But it's not always an engineering issue. Business problems, exacerbated by the recession, are foreclosing some technological possibilities before they have a chance to play out. A bad economy combined with a glut of companies combined to likewise devastate the green-tech industry in the mid-1980s.

Given the likelihood that the vast majority of today's VC-backed green-tech companies will fail, even if some succeed wildly, it's troubling that data-sharing remains rare.

What will happen to the data from failed wind and solar companies? Unlike the Smith-Putnam turbine, they might take the key to the next breakthrough to their corporate graves.

Despite Putnam's initial hopes, his turbine was never rebuilt, nor any more on its exact model. Within six months of the catastrophic blade failure, the S. Morgan Smith Company shut down its wind program. They pulled the plug instead of plunking down the additional $300,000 that Putnam needed.

The blade was carted off, the turbine torn down. A cellphone tower now adorns Grandpa's Knob.